Smash Cut

Brazilian cinema doesn’t have much of a foothold in the States — even less so when you’re talking about Brazilian genre movies — but there’s a definite die-hard cult following for José Mojica Marins, a.k.a. “Coffin Joe.” Marins has directed over thirty features and starred in over forty, appearing in many of those as his Coffin Joe alter ego. The movies, which sport evocative titles like At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul or This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, are essentially hallucinatory, non-narrative collections of horror-themed vignettes, bound together by the the presence of Coffin Joe, as he prowls Brazil in search of the perfect woman to bear him a son.

It’s been about twenty years since Marins’s last movie, so it’s quite a coup that his latest, Embodiment of Evil, is not only garnering attention, but has the honor of playing at the 65th Venice International Film Festival tomorrow, Aug. 31. The press already had a chance to have a peek at it yesterday (the photo above is Marins, decked out as Coffin Joe, rocking the red carpet), and here is an early review. A subtitled trailer can be seen here. I think it’s safe to say that the preview’s not safe for work (well, depending on your gig).

Anyone who’s read my blog before can probably tell that I have some pretty unabashed cine-love for the films of John Carpenter. I think he’s s terrific craftsman, truly one of America’s most undervalued directors. He knows — better than any contemporary filmmaker, in my opinion — how to beautifully fill and balance a CinemaScope frame, and he always packs enough subversive wit and content into his movies to make them unusual. And hey, they’ve got action too. That’s never a bad thing in my book.

The programmers a Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek must agree, because starting on Labor Day, from Sept. 1 - 4, they’ve got “A Four-Pack of Carpenter”, a special repertory screening series that brings a quartet of ’80s classics back where they should be enjoyed: on the big screen.

Go here for the full schedule. Click on the following titles to see trailers for the four movies they’re showing: the martial arts fantasy/comedy Big Trouble in Little China, the dystopian action pic Escape from New York, the classic ice-bound horror remake The Thing, and, just in time for election season, the sci-fi conspiracy thriller They Live.

…the film’s called Bitch Slap! This riff on ’60s exploitation cinema, A.I.P. B-movies, and pics like Russ Meyer’s bodaciously amazing Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is slated for a 2009 release, and directed by Rick Jacobson. The name might not ring a bell with you, but he’s helmed various episodes of TV’s “Xena: Warrior Princess” and “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys”, so expect tongue to be placed firmly in cheek with this one. (Not surprisingly, Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless, the stars of those two series, have roles in Bitch Slap, along with Death Proof’s New Zealand stunt sensation, Zoe Bell.)

These self-conscious, contemporary “homages” to my beloved grungy classics never really sit well with me — I generally find them way too cute in their references, or so bogged down by their fidelity to their inspirations that they never find the same amount of raw energy that was present in the originals — but I must admit that I give this one some points for its title alone.

The film’s official website is here and you can watch the trailer there as well.

I blogged some days ago about French director Mathieu Kassovitz and his big-budget sci-fi pic Babylon A.D., which opens this Friday.

Well, some interesting developments have come up since then.

Most directors probably hope for boffo box-office numbers for their film’s opening weekend, but it seems that Kassovitz would prefer that everyone — at least everyone in America — stay away from his Vin Diesel-starrer. In a very rare (but admittedly kind of refreshing) bit of Hollywood trash-talking, Kassovitz told AMC’s blog that Babylon A.D.’s studio, 20th Century Fox, gave him hell every step of the way, nixed important script concepts, removed all of the socio-political issues that were carried over from the original Maurice Georges Dantec novel, took the movie away from him, and hacked out about 15 minutes, resulting in what the director calls “a bad episode of 24.” (The “international version” of the film, playing outside the U.S., apparently retains those cut scenes.)

Production sources, on the other hand, have issued statements saying that all of Babylon A.D.’s problems were due to Kassovitz, who proved unpredictable as a filmmaker, and created a whole “series of headaches” during the shoot. (Filming did reportedly run well over budget and beyond schedule.)

You can read the full Kassovitz AMC interview here.

With this year’s Democratic National Convention currently in full swing, I thought it’d be appropriate to take a look back to 40 years ago, when another convention was caught on celluloid, with stunning, sometimes harrowing, results.

The ’60s was a rich decade for American filmmaking, with the simmering counterculture finding ways to work its ideas and politics into mainstream movies. Easy Rider has probably come to embody that time frame and phase of cinema for most, but I’d argue that 1969’s Medium Cool is a much more audacious and important work.

Directed by renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool channeled documentary techniques and actor improvisations (before that stuff became trendy or overly exaggerated, a la today’s Paul Greengrass) to bring life to the basic, nominal story about a news cameraman and his budding relationship with a woman (Verna Bloom) and her young son. The woefully undervalued actor Robert Forster — whom Quentin Tarantino tried to bring back into the limelight with 1997’s Jackie Brown — plays that cameraman, John Cassellis.

What could have been a standard melodrama found a new form via Wexler’s revolutionary filmmaking. By having Forster pose as a real cameraman, and putting him in genuine “newsworthy” situations, the movie morphed from a small-scale relationship pic into an eye-opening portrait of America’s social turmoil of the period. The most explosive culmination of that life + art mix-up is the finale of the film, in which Cassellis covers the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. That year had already delivered some major shake-ups for this country, with the double punch of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy still fresh in everyone’s minds. That cultural unease triggered mass protests, and while Medium Cool’s cameras were rolling at the convention, riots broke out and chaos ensued. Aside from its overall aesthetic excellence (courtesy of Wexler, who also served as the director of photography), the film’s beauty lies in its ability to directly reflect a specific national mindset of the time. Granted, I’m sure not everyone in America shared its politics, but the movie addresses issues — social, political, and media-related — with a directness that seems impossible for a Hollywood studio production. Medium Cool is a genuine cinematic treasure, and it is, unsurprisingly, rather timely and relevant to our own concerns today.

There’s a terrific, brand-new interview with star Robert Forster over here, and it’s well worth reading even if you haven’t seen the film. When you read the actor’s recollections about the shooting of the movie, or meeting Muhammad Ali during the shoot, or hearing about Robert Kennedy’s death, you’ll probably want to revisit the movie, even if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, or try to track it down for the first time.

You can watch the original trailer for Medium Cool here.

A bit too excited. Watch out there, Mr. Muscles from Brussels.

OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s this young boy, see, and he goes to the United Kingdom, but then runs afoul of some nefarious forces at work over there, and discovers a grand adventure in the process.

Sound familiar? To tell you the truth, I think it sounds a bit nondescript, but the main catch is the name of the boy: Hari Puttar. It has a bit of a “Harry Potter” ring to it, at least according to the legal department at Warner Bros. Studios. The latter are suing the Mumbai-based production outfit Mirchi Movies for making a film entitled Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors, which is scheduled for a September 12 release.

Warner Bros. thinks that the title character’s name in the Bollywood pic shares just a bit too much similarity with that of their teen wizard franchise, so, as Mr. Burns might say, they’re releasing the hounds. The American studio brass do have a point: if you watch the unsubtitled trailer and listen to the enunciation of the title as it’s being sung, it does, indeed, ape “Harry Potter.”

But if you ask me, Hari Puttar looks more like a Grade-Z version of one of those insufferable Home Alone flicks with Macaulay Culkin, and no one will confuse Puttar with Potter by any stretch. Sure, there’s a slight bit of shameless mimcry going on, and they do toss in a big steam train and a Hagrid-esque bear of a man, but check out the preview for yourself. Methinks that WB doth protest too much.

At any rate, if this silliness has piqued your curiosity, you can visit the official Hari Puttar website here.

One of the greatest symphonic soundtracks of all time, by my reckoning, is the late Basil Poledouris’s work for John Milius’s 1982 adaptation of Conan the Barbarian. It’s rousing, epic, sweeping, romantic, and grandiose, without being so weighty or overblown as to distract from the macho clashes of steel rampaging across the screen. The thunderous opening notes of its main theme (”Anvil of Crom”) throw down its certifiable Bad Ass-ness from the get-go.

Remember the time when you saw the very first teaser for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator with Russell Crowe? How the music swelled during the studio logos at the head, and made you think — or made you feel in the core of your being — you were in for something great? (And perhaps if you were, like me, totally won over by that teaser, you were a bit let down by the movie itself not living up to it.) Well, if you didn’t happen to recognize it at the time, that was the Conan score that was backing the preview, and I daresay that it was 99.9% because of Poledouris’s music that the trailer made the movie into a full-blown box-office success, thanks to a bright marketing individual at Universal or DreamWorks.

Poledouris also composed the terrific soundtracks for Paul Verhoeven’s unforgettable sci-fi actioners RoboCop and Starship Troopers, as well as for that Dutch auteur’s twisted medieval drama Flesh + Blood. But it’s Conan for which he’ll probably be best remembered, and in tribute to Poledouris (who passed away in November 2006), I offer this clip of him conducting (the latter half of) the best-known cue from that score, “Anvil of Crom,” at a live performance. That hearty applause at the end is well-deserved.

If you’re like me, you first witnessed the Japanese phenomenon that is “Beat” Takeshi Kitano with one of those dark, uncompromising movies mentioned in the header. Or perhaps it was Sonatine, the lyrical gangster pic that Quentin Tarantino championed via his short-lived Rolling Thunder distribution label. Or maybe it was his action-packed 2003 remake of the blind swordsman classic Zatoichi.

Regardless of which one was your first, if you became a fan, then Kitano’s unique juggling act of crystalline cinematography, sudden eruptions of violence, carefully timed edits, deadpan gallows humor and quirky narratives all wowed you as they did me. The man is an amazing talent, one who writes, directs, edits, and stars in his own films, while somehow finding the time to be a newspaper columnist, novelist and a television host as well. Oh, and let’s not forget that he was once a popular stand-up comic too. (That’s where he got his nickname of “Beat”; the act was called The Two Beats.)

Anyway, Violent Cop (his 1989 directorial debut, which was originally to have been helmed by Battle Royale director Kinji Fukasaku) and Boiling Point (his hallucinatory second work) were both released on DVD in the U.S. before. Unfortunately, those Fox Lorber editions — which are now out-of-print — had horrible, heavily pixellated transfers that were damned near unwatchable. I think my bootleg VHS tapes were better!

So it’s with a happy heart that I read on independent DVD producer and film distributor Marc Walkow’s blog that his company Outcast Cinema is currently working with Kitano’s production company, Office Kitano, to start putting together materials for new discs. The DVD production process can take some time, so I’m not exactly holding my breath for these, but it pleases me to no end that I can finally toss out my raggedy, heavily-watched VHS tapes and lousy first-generation discs of those two masterpieces.

For the uninitiated, there’s a subtitled trailer for Violent Cop (for which the original Japanese title roughly translates as Watch Out! That Man is Crazy!) over here and an unsubtitled one for Boiling Point here.

Oh yeah! It’s got police (satirized in a kind of Starship Troopers-esque way), it takes place in Tokyo, and, well, it’s got gore. Buckets and gallons of it!

Eihi Shiina — who became a bit of a cult sensation in the States after starring in prolific madman Takashi Miike’s nerve-wracking Audition — plays the sword-wielding Ruka, a high-strung policewoman on a mission to rid a near-future cityscape of homicidal mutants while seeking revenge for her father’s murder.

Made by the same creative team responsible for the over-the-top Machine Girl (another movie that mirrors the promise of its title), Tokyo Gore Police delivers the psychotronic goods. Totally transgressive in almost every way (you won’t see equivalents for its effects and set-pieces coming out of Hollywood anytime soon, let me tell you), and with loopy action sequences choreographed by Tak Sakaguchi of the zombie action smash Versus, the film’s a guaranteed night of sanguine insanity if you can stomach it. There are, to be sure, some slow bits (you know, when some perfunctory plotting gets in the way of the outlandish visuals…the script is not its strongest point), but in the end it’s safe to say that anyone who makes it to the end of this blood-splattered freakout will have found at least one scene that lives up to the statement, “I never saw something like that before!”

The movie will have a limited release in the U.S. (no dates/locations specified yet by distributor Tokyo Shock, although New York’s ImaginAsian Theater hints at a booking soon-ish on their website’s “Coming Soon” section). In the meantime, you can check out the (probably not-so-safe-for-work) trailer over here.